A Secret World Chronicle Prequel Story
Mercedes Lackey’s first fiction sales were to Sword and Sorceress 3 and Sword and Sorceress 4, and both sales were made on the same day. She came to visit Marion, bringing two stories with her. She and I were in the office while Marion was in the music room reading them. After a while her voice floated back the length of the house, “Damn you, Misty!” While Misty understandably cringed at that, I started laughing and explained it just meant that Marion liked both stories too much to part with either of them. So Marion bought them both, and those were the first of many stories about Tarma and Kethry. By the time Marion died, there were two novels and a Tarma/Kethry anthology. So for this volume Misty decided to turn to urban fantasy, with a story about Vickie, one of her Secret World Chronicle characters as a young girl. Misty tells me that she can write more stories about Vickie, and I hope to see them in future volumes of Sword and Sorceress.
Mercedes Lackey was born in Chicago Illinois on June 24, 1950. The very next day, the Korean War was declared. It is hoped that there is no connection between the two events. Her first novel was published in 1987. In 1990 she met artist Larry Dixon at a small Science Fiction convention in Meridian, Mississippi, on a television interview organized by the convention.
They moved to their current home, the “second weirdest house in Oklahoma” also in 1992. She has many pet parrots and “the house is never quiet.” She has over eighty books in print, with four being published in 2014 alone, and some of her foreign editions can be found in Russian, German, Czech, Polish, French, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese.
From a collaboration with Dennis Lee, Cody Martin and Veronica Giguere came the Secret World Chronicle, www.secretworldchronicle, a five book series of which the first four: Invasion!, World Divided, Revolution!, and Collision! are available from Baen.
Mercedes Lackey has written and published 125 books in many series, including the Hunter, Valdemar, Elemental Masters, SERRAted Edge, Elvenbane, and Obsidian Mountain series from Hyperion, DAW, Baen, Tor and many others.
When Josh opened his eyes, he was terrified; terrified that he didn’t know where he was, and terrified that he’d gone blind. The only time he’d ever been in a place this dark was in a subway during a power failure. When you’re living on the streets, nighttime is never really dark. Whether you’re sleeping under a bridge, in an abandoned building, or in a shelter, there’s always light you can’t block out; from street-lamps, from neon-signs, from the lights in the shelter they keep on all night to keep kids from getting out of bed and “wandering.”
So he wasn’t in any of those places; if he was…he’d gone blind.
He felt around himself in a panic, trying to pull up his last memory before waking up here. He was lying on cold cement…and it was just as quiet as it was dark.
Just as it was never completely dark when you lived on the street, it was never silent either. So…either he’d gone deaf and blind, or…
Now he remembered. Or rather, didn’t because he didn’t remember being brought here, wherever “here” was. The last thing he remembered was some people in a white van passing out bags of fast food. He was the last to get one. He remembered his hand taking the bag, and feeling the warmth of the food inside…and then, nothing.
He thought he heard a sound behind him, sat up and turned, and that was when he saw a thin, dim line of light at floor level. Was it under a door?
But the relief he felt made him light-headed. At least he wasn’t blind and deaf!
His relief only lasted as long as it took for the door to open, and see what was standing there. The silhouettes, at least, because the dim light was behind them, and they were black. Not “African-American” black. Not even tribal African black. They were a black that had no other color in it, and even seemed to swallow up light.
And they were…monstrous. Like something out of a horror movie. Bald heads, long, pointed noses, ears, and chins, eyes burning in those black faces, red as hot coals. Arms and legs too long, torsos too short, hunched backs. Joints that were…wrong. Limbs that could have been rebroken and set to heal badly. Something about them hit him in the gut with an atavistic wave of paralyzing fear, fear that said his ancestors had faced these things in the dim, collective past, and it had not gone well.
Before he could move, they surged into the room and seized him, one and two to a limb, heaved them over their heads and carried him out like some sort of trophy. He got a glimpse of what could have been a subway platform, long deserted, before they carried him into a tunnel. Then, he could only see, dimly, the roof of the tunnel going by.
Frozen with fear, he did not even try to fight them.
Then they came into the light, and before he could think, he was thrown against a pair of metal beams and shackled there, hand and foot, spread-eagled between the two.
He could not see what was behind him, but in front of him was a ring of camping lanterns, half of a circle painted on the ground inscribed with things he could not read, and four people in those all-over-suits of white Tyvek that industrial painters or people who worked in clean-rooms wore. The people had the white hoods up and tied around their faces, and respirators.
And long knives in their hands.
They were talking.
“…you should have seen his face. Stevenson has never lost a case like this. He couldn’t believe it when he heard the jury verdict. He’s already filed a motion to look into jury tampering.” The man laughed.
Another laughed with him. “We know how that’s going to go. Well, we need to get this one done in a hurry. My jury is going to adjourn to deliberate tomorrow. I want the spell to have time to settle into their brains before they do.”
The other three nodded, and the first man stepped up to Josh. Only now did he actually look at Josh. Finally Josh broke through his own paralysis to—well he wanted to scream, but all he managed was a whimper. “Please…let me go.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” the man said, raising his knife. “He likes screaming.”
~o0o~
Vickie Nagy sat patiently outside the office of the new Director of the FBI’s Metahuman Division. Specifically, he was assigning Department 39 a case and did not like what two of the three members of 39 were telling him. She wondered if he realized that she could hear everything that was being said in there. Would it be too smart-ass of me to just walk in there and…yeah, yeah it would.
He was objecting to the fact that her parents were including 16-year-old her on the assignment they were supposed to be leaving on…scratch that, they were now a half hour late. Missed our flight. Which means we get the jet. Cool. She had absolutely no doubt whatsoever that she was going on this assignment, despite the fact that she was a high-school junior and not an actual agent, just the offspring of two of the only three magic-using agents the FBI had. The new Director wasn’t getting any choice. Just like the last Director hadn’t had any choice. And from the sound of things, Mom was about to go into full demonstration mode.
The new Director’s voice rose. “Agent Nagy, what are you—”
Her mother’s voice was perfectly even. But Vickie could read the fury just under the surface. The Director should have known better than to mess with an Irish redhead. “Demonstrating.”
Vickie braced herself, and from behind the door there came the utterly predictable sounds of a computer hard-drive doing a hard, hard crash, and a number of electrical arcs, and—it was a good thing that the Director’s computer had a nice expensive LCD monitor instead of a CRT. At least this time there wasn’t an implosion, the way there had been the last time Mom had “demonstrated.”
Good gods, I hope that hard drive didn’t spit shrapnel. Wonder if the fire alarm is going to go off this time?
There was the sound of windows being hastily opened, and the smell of burning plastic seeped under the door. But this time, no fire alarm.
Guess not.
The Director’s secretary, who clearly had expected this as well, was already on the phone to IT.
“She warned, you sir. Repeatedly.” That was Dad. “This is why, if you are going to insist that we use the tech gear, Victoria has to go along. She’s the only one of us that can handle tech without it blowing up in her face. She’s the only one that can insulate the tech gear so we don’t blow up what we need to use, and she’ll need to renew that protection fairly frequently.”
“We told you,” Mom said, biting off each word. “We kept telling you. We’re not metahumans. Our abilities don’t work like a metahuman’s. That’s all in our bloody files.”
Mom hadn’t added, you cretinous, bureaucratic prat, but she didn’t have to.
There was a long pause. “Send her in.”
Vickie took that as the cue for her entrance. She gauged the new Director at a glance. He looked like the original Great Stone Face. There was no sign of a sense of humor in him. No, this was not a guy to be smart-assed with. She took a respectful “parade rest” stance just beside her father, Alexander Nagy, and said nothing.
He looked her up and down while the geeks arrived and began installing his new computer and putting the old one on the cart to be taken away. At least that hard drive is quite thoroughly destroyed. Ain’t nobody getting nothin’ off that baby.
The computer her mother had just fried with a touch was impressively, visibly damaged. Looked like the hard drive had thrown shrapnel; the case had contained it, barely.
“So. Your parents think they need you on this assignment.” The way he was eyeing her suggested he was waiting for a response.
“They’ve needed me on assignments since I was twelve, sir.” She kept her face completely expressionless. She considered adding “That’s in my file,” but…no. “I’m a mathemagician, a techno-shaman, and a geomancer. I am good at self-defense. I have black-belts in staff, aikido and tae kwan do. I regularly score the same as my father on the indoor and outdoor ranges with a 9 mil. And I’m a traceur in parkour. I can defend myself at need, but more importantly for the purposes of the team, I know not only when to run, and I run very fast, but I can just about run up the side of a building if I have to.” She lifted her chin a little. “My mother didn’t raise any hostages.”
The Director just gave her a long, unreadable look. “Explain mathemagician, techno-shaman and geomancer.”
“Instead of needing to memorize spell-castings or use components, I understand spell-casting in mathematical terms. My mother uses diagrams, chants and physical objects to impose her will on the physical world. I can do that, too, and sometimes do, but mostly I visualize equations, then work through them to the answer to impose my will on the physical world. I can also read someone else’s work as an equation and duplicate it, without knowing how they themselves achieved the result. That’s a mathemagician. I’m one of three that I know of.” She took a deep breath. “As for being a techno-shaman, I also am able to interface with technology on an intuitive level, and unlike virtually every other magician that I know of, I don’t blow the stuff up just by touching it. I can use it like a normal person, and I can interface with it with my magical abilities.”
“Magicians do that,” said Moira Nagy, frowning. “Blow tech things up, that is. As I explained.”
“Some are more reactive than others,” Vickie put in. “My mother and Agent Stormdance can drive, use electrical appliances and household gear, and don’t burn down the house every time they touch a light-switch—but I know people who do burn down the house just by touching a light-switch. But the more circuit-boards that are in something, the more likely it is that my mother and Agent Stormdance will fry them. I am able to insulate things like their communications headsets from them in such a way that they still work, but the spell has to fight against them and their innate hostility to tech and wears off after a while, and I have to renew it.”
“We’re not metahumans,” Moira repeated. “We’re something else. We’re magicians. And that’s why we are in our own Department in the FBI, because there are people—and things—out there that are criminal and also magical, and the Metahuman Division can’t handle them.”
Ye-ah. The Metahuman Division has gotten their lunch eaten by those things again, or you wouldn’t have been told to bring in Department 39.
But the Director was still focusing on something Vickie had said. “You say there are people who can burn down a house by just touching something in contact with the electrical circuits?” His eyes narrowed speculatively. “Can we recruit—”
“How would you get them to assignments?” Moira demanded. “Walk? Ride horses? Borrow an Amish buggy? They make airplanes crash. They stop cars. They literally live as if they were in the 1850s because every time they touch something modern it destroys itself.”
“I can only do so much,” Vickie admitted. “I’ve tried insulating one of them long enough to take a ride into town. It didn’t end well, in an extremely expensive fashion.” When the Director looked blank, she added, “To be specific, the engine threw not one, not two, but three tie-rods, and the transmission ate half its gears, and it’s a good thing that the thing was rolling to a stop at the time because the last thing that happened was that the power brakes and steering both went in spectacular fashion.”
“Oh.” The Director frowned. Another one that doesn’t like hearing the word “no,” I see.
“And the last, geomancer, I can ‘read’ the ground and tell you what’s on it and under it to about a hundred feet, and I can make the earth do what I want.” She explained. “Like open it up under someone, or bury them. But that’s very costly in terms of me. Magic operates by the rules of physics and math. It’s moving energy, and sometimes matter around. Matter is harder to move than energy. So when I do something that has a physical effect, it wears me out. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, just like my mother and Agent Stormdance.”
“Why not your father?” The Director frowned.
“Because I’m not a magician. I’m a werewolf,” said Alexander Nagy, evenly. “It runs in my family. Rather than using magic, I am a species of magical creature. Would you like a demonstration?”
“No, one demonstration is enough for one day.” The Director ran his hand over his face. At that moment, Vickie felt sorry for him. After all it wasn’t his fault that Director Eames had dropped over dead of a stroke last night.
I did warn Eames. So did Mom. So did his doctor, I bet. But he just wouldn’t get that blood-pressure under control. And it’s not as if there weren’t metahuman healers who could have helped him do that.
And since Department 39 was an extremely well-kept secret, even in the FBI, this guy had probably thought Agents Nagy, Nagy, and Stormdance were just garden-variety metahumans, like everyone else in the Metahuman Division.
“And we’ve missed our commercial flight,” Moira pointed out. “It’s the last one tonight.”
The Director grimaced. “Get out to the airport, then, I’ll have them warm up the jet. How long will it take you to get there?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Moira said crisply.
The Director nodded, as if he was finally happy with something. “Go. That pile of bodies is not going to get any bigger on my watch.”
~o0o~
Alex Nagy was the putative leader of the team, but the reality was that any of the three of them switched out as lead. This time, however, since Alex was the one who’d gotten the full briefing before his wife and daughter had arrived, he was the one who convened them all around the little table in the FBI jet.
“So, this is what was important enough to pull you out of school for a week, Vickie,” he said, dropping a folder full of crime-scene photos on the table. “The Director wasn’t kidding about the pile of bodies.”
Vickie was no stranger to photos of dead bodies, even ones as gruesomely tortured as these were. But the number was surprising. “Jesus Cluny Frog…a dozen?”
“More. Fourteen. They go back about five years, according to forensics, but they stop a year ago.” Alex passed the forensics report to Hosteen Stormdance, the Dineh medicine chief. “And chances are that’s only because whoever perpetrated this found another dump site.”
Hosteen picked up one of the photos and examined it critically. “Ritual torture, made to last as long as possible,” he said, flatly.
“That’s why we’re going,” replied Alex. “And that, Vickie, is why we pulled you out of school. These are all teenagers, street kids probably. We’ve started to ID some of them. There’s no one in the office that can pass as a street kid.” Her father raised an eyebrow at her significantly.
Vickie nodded; she’d had the feeling her mother and father had been less than truthful about why they wanted their daughter along on this jaunt. She petted her familiar, an enormous British Blue cat named Gray. “Now that I’ve got Gray, you have a way to keep track of me without a wire, or at least, without an earpiece, which kids are definitely going to spot.”
“Bingo. We want you wired to record, but Gray will be your backup while we work the other angles.” Alex smiled, proudly. Vickie didn’t smile—this was too nasty a situation for her to feel anything but concern and some nausea—but she nodded.
“I’m going to want to stop at a Goodwill and a store,” was all she said.
~o0o~
Hosteen was canvassing the shelters; he passed for someone down-on-his-luck far better than the extremely Caucasian Moira and Alexander Nagy did. Alex and Moira were doing the same, but in the official capacity, all suits and badges. Vickie had dressed down in torn jeans, knitted hat, several layers of tattered sweatshirt and sweaters, and ratty trainers, with backpack containing pretty much what you’d expect a street kid to have. Everything she wore was painfully clean, but oversized, faded and aged. Her recording mic was concealed in the layers of bulky clothing, and she didn’t wear an earpiece. Streetwise kids could be good at spotting someone who was wired.
This was the bad part of Boston; it was assumed the street kids had all come from here. They’d been found in the Fall River State Forest, which was a good hour away from here, and across several police jurisdictions. Right now conventional agents were combing the area where the bodies had been found. The Spook Squad didn’t need to be there for that. In fact, it would be better if the bodies and any potential evidence were removed before they got there, so they could avoid contaminating the crime scene with the magic forensics they planned to use.
The Fall River State Forest was part of the so-called “Bridgewater Triangle,” an area that was supposed to be a hotbed of occult and bizarre sightings and activities. Everything from UFOs to Bigfoot to alleged Satanic activity had been reported in there. The Nagys had never worked a case here before, but, at least during Vickie’s lifetime, the only fatalities that had occurred there that were not—on the surface, at least—accidents, were cattle and deer mutilations. Not the sort of thing the FBI got involved with, not even FBI Metahuman.
Well, that changed. Vickie walked slowly along the street, shoulders hunched against the cold, heading for an abandoned apartment building street people were squatting in. Supposedly most of them were kids, so that was a good place to start. In her backpack she had a plastic shopping bag with two loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter to make friends with.
It was pretty easy to tell which building it was. The front was boarded up, and so were the downstairs windows. Like that was going to stop anyone.
Vickie sat down on the front steps as if she was tired, and waited until there was no one on either side of the street for a block in either direction. Then she slipped into the narrow passageway between her target and the next building and made her way into the back. That was where her source had said she could get into the building.
The windows and doors were boarded up here, too, and covered with graffiti and gang-signs, but it was easy to spot where one of the sheets of plywood over the door had been loosened. She pried it away, slipped inside, and let it shut behind her, standing in the dark until her eyes adjusted.
The building smelled, like all of these buildings smelled, of urine and feces, mildew and mold, damp, rotting wood, crumbling brick, and lingering stale food-aromas. If despair had a smell, this was it. No smell of rotting food though; no food ever stayed around in a place like this long enough to rot. Vickie found herself in a back-entrance, with a hallway in front of her. Cautiously, with one hand on the knife she could reach through a slit in her pocket, she set out to make some friends.
~o0o~
The girl’s name was Sue. No last name. No one had a last name here. Probably “Sue” wasn’t even her real name. Vickie squatted on her heels next to the girl while Sue ate the peanut butter sandwich Vickie had made for her in careful, tiny bites.
She’s been out here a while. She’s learned to make a meal last.
One of the victims had already been identified, the most recent of the bodies. The team had gotten all the relevant details as soon as they arrived, and Vickie had been hunting for someone with information. With access to the background that the FBI could get hold of, pretending that Vickie had been the victim’s friend “back home” had been easy. “About Abby, you said you knew something,” Vickie said, in a quiet, slightly hoarse voice. “When did you see her?”
Sue finished the sandwich and tucked her empty hands into her sleeves, hunched over on the ratty sleeping bag she was using. “At the shelter. That’s the last time I saw her. We both got beds and they said we’d have them for at least a week, so we were both pretty happy. But she got up in the middle of the night, and…I dunno, I woke up when she did, and it was like there was something wrong. I said her name, and she didn’t even look at me. So I figured I’d follow her, just in case, you know, somebody had slipped her something or she was going out to score, ’cause it’s a bad idea to go out to score alone. She just put on her shoes and snuck out the back door. Left everything. Out in the alley she got into a van, like a medium blue panel van, and I remember she was talking to someone in a van like that just before we tried the shelter.” Sue took a deep, ragged breath. “I never saw her again.”
This was the third eyewitness to an abduction, and the third person that had seen a kid picked up by a blue panel van, seemingly without a struggle. The first two had been more recent than Abby, but did not have corresponding corpses, so it looked as if Dad’s hunch was right, and the killers had a newer dump-site than the one that had been found. This was all beginning to add up to a very slick operation. But this was the first time someone had seen enough to make it clear that something odd had been going on with the victim.
There was, however, a very large problem; right now there was no way to tell just how the kids had been lured into the van in the first place. There were a lot of ways, magically speaking, that you could use to coerce someone into doing something.
But this was enough information for now, it was going to be dark soon, and it was time to get off the street. Not that she was afraid, except maybe of a gang of six or more, but it was going to be very difficult to explain to the local police how the daughter of two FBI agents came to be in this part of town standing over a mugger who’d eaten his own knife.
Time to pick up some carry-out and get back to the hotel room.
~o0o~
She was inhaling take-out Chinese, sharing shrimp with Gray, when Hosteen got back to the motel suite. “I hope you got me—” the Dineh Medicine Chief began, when Vickie waved her chopsticks at the brown paper bags on the bureau next to the television. “Pork Fried Rice, Mandarin Chicken, and lychee fruit,” she said. “When have I ever failed you, godfather?” Then she added, “Don’t answer that.”
Hosteen chuckled, and searched through the white paper cartons for his favorites. “Moira and Alex are not far behind. Was your search fruitful?”
“Yes,” she said, “And none of you are going to like what I have to tell you.”
As if they had heard the cue, there was the sound of a key in the door, and Moira and Alex entered. Vickie got her lack of height from both parents, but she got most of her looks from her father, Alexander. He was a handsome man, compact and slim, with shaggy blond hair, and it was obvious to anyone who saw them together that they were father and daughter. All she had gotten from her mother were the redhead’s green eyes and slender build.
“You got food!” Alex exclaimed with relief.
“Figured you wouldn’t have time,” Vickie replied.
“From your faces, I conclude that the journey to Fall River Forest was unfruitful,” Hosteen observed, as the couple threw their coats on a chair and helped themselves to take-out.
“No trace of anything magical at the sight, and only a faint trace of some form of ritual magic, so faint I couldn’t tell what it was, except that it was bad,” Moira replied with a grimace. “As if that wasn’t obvious from the photos. Forensics thinks not only was this was a dump site but the bodies were cleaned before they were dumped there. I’d agree. Cleaned of magic fingerprints as well.”
“Well, I’ve got something, but let’s wait until you’re done eating,” Vickie told them. “Because it’s complicated.”
Eventually the Chinese take-out was nothing more than a set of neatly-nested white cartons in the bottom of one of the brown paper bags Vickie had picked up. The team was disposed around the sofas of the center room of the suite, with a map of Boston and the surrounding area spread out on the cocktail table between them.
“Okay,” Vickie said, when everyone was ready. “Whoever is doing this is slick. Every single one of those kids was taken from a different spot where street kids hang out. Angela went missing from Harvard Square.” She tapped the map. “Tomas from Pine Street. Kevin from Franklin Street.” She went through the litany of far-too-many names, tapping the spots where each of them had lived, or at least, the neighborhood where they’d found places to sleep, until they had disappeared. “For the most part, they just vanished; their friends never saw what happened to them. But I did manage to dig up a couple eyewitnesses. And that’s the part you aren’t going to like.”
She described what her witnesses had told her. All three of the adults exchanged a look of dismay. Well, she was pretty damn terrified about it herself, but…
“Someone has to play bait and none of us look young enough,” Alex said, stating the obvious.
She took a deep, if a trifle shaky, breath, and nodded. This…was the other reason why she was here. From the time she could understand such things, she had known that the mere fact of having abilities like hers meant she had to use them, as metahumans did, to protect people who didn’t. That had been a family tradition, in the Nagy line, at least, going back to pre-Christian times. The family motto even translated to “Duty Above All.”
“Obviously that someone would be me.” She reminded herself that this was not the first time she’d been the bait for a trap, although it was the first time she’d done so in an open urban environment. And it was the first time they’d all gone into this blind.
But she also knew exactly how she would feel if she didn’t volunteer, and another kid died.
“We could get an undercover agent,” Moira said. “You don’t have to do this.”
“And first, you have to talk the Director into this, and you’ll be putting someone out there who hasn’t got the first idea magic even exists,” she responded, stating out loud what they already knew. “It’d be like dropping a raw recruit straight into a war zone. He won’t know what he’s seeing, or how to interpret it, and you may not even be able to locate or contact him once he’s been snatched. By now the Director has finally read through some of your case-files and is beginning to realize how dicey your cases are, and he’ll know all this, and while you try and talk him into it, kids will be dying.” She stopped for a moment, realizing her voice was starting to rise. Steady, girl. “So I’ll go. After all, this is exactly what you’ve trained me for and raised me to do.”
Not for the first time, she saw that expression of mixed pain and pride on her parents’ faces.
And even though her palms were sweating, and she had a cold lump in her stomach…it was worth it.
~o0o~
“Hey, kid.”
Vickie started, hoping the reaction didn’t look too artificial. The voice came out of an alley next to her, and it belonged to a woman in a warm-looking puffy coat standing next to a (bingo!) medium blue panel van. She peered suspiciously at the woman, not getting any closer.
The street was mostly deserted; it was too cold for people to want to spend any more time out in the weather than they had to, and it looked like it was going to drop sleet or snow any moment. This was a sad, rather than a bad part of town; so many boarded-up store-fronts. Which wasn’t so bad for the street kids, who could sometimes find their way inside and have a sheltered place to sleep until someone found out, ran them off, and boarded it up tight again. There was only one other thing visible, in fact, besides her. An enormous gray cat.
“Whatcha want?” Vickie asked, hoarsely. She didn’t get any closer. No smart street kid would, even if it was a woman, and not a man, next to that van. It would be too easy for someone inside the van to jump out and push you in.
I’m watching, Vickie heard in her head. Good. Gray was her failsafe, her backup, in case things didn’t go according to plan. Hosteen, even dressed like a bum, might have been noticed. Her parents certainly would have been. Another car on the street might have given the kidnappers pause. But who notices a cat?
“Just giving out meals,” the woman said, with a smile, and stepped over to her, moving slowly, and holding out a white paper sack with the name and logo of a burger chain on it. Vickie didn’t approach her. She waited until the woman was just within reach, took the bag and stepped back, quickly.
And at the same time, she felt the spell hit her.
She and her mother had anticipated this. She was now an observer, wide awake, within a body that was being controlled by the spellcaster. She watched and listened as the woman chattered to her, asking questions…what was her name, where was she from, how old was she, why was she out here alone, where was she staying. Her body, however, gave the answers Vickie wanted it to, not the truth; the fiction of another runaway, another street kid, escaping from alcoholic parents, hiding out in the former grocery store three doors down. The woman was clearly pleased with the answers.
Vickie assumed that once the woman was done determining that she was yet another kid who wouldn’t be missed, she’d be sent on her way, to go to sleep in the grocery and wake up to walk out into the arms of the magicians.
But suddenly, she found herself moving towards the van, as the side door slid open.
Oh shit. They’ve gotten cocky enough to work by daylight—she thought. And then she was in the van, and without warning, everything went dark.
~o0o~
When she woke up again, everything was still dark; black as pitch, in fact. She was lying on damp cement, and her hands and face were cold and clammy. There was a musty smell, and a sound of dripping water. She sat up quickly, and passed her hand in front of her face, and still saw nothing. For one moment, she panicked, thinking she was blind. Then her brain snapped back into high gear and she pushed the button to light up the face of her watch.
Only 8 PM. So she hadn’t been gone off the street longer than three hours. But the spell that had been controlling her was gone, so either it had worn out, or her captors had taken it off.
Her backpack was gone; she searched her pockets and came up empty. Of course they searched me and took away anything they thought I might be able to use. Smart of them, and the reason why she wasn’t wearing a tracker or a wire. Of course, they had no idea that Vickie’s real weapon was herself.
...I hope.
Because this was slick. Very, very slick. And wherever she was, she was all alone.
The first thing she did was put up her own magical defenses, ripping through the equations that were so familiar that she could quite literally do them in her sleep, so whoever the spellcaster was wouldn’t be able to pull any more shenanigans. Then she invoked mage-sight, to see if there was anything she could learn about where she was.
Nothing. Anything living gave off at least a faint glow to mage-sight, and she had expected at least the floor to be crawling with bacteria. But…nothing. Between when the last prisoner had been here and now, the place had been literally scoured and sanitized.
Someone was being very, very careful. That was…interesting. It suggested very strongly that this “someone” knew forensics extremely well, and had made sure there was absolutely nothing that could link him back to the previous victims.
Well, at least I’m not going to get infected with anything, she thought, and licked her finger and began drawing an intricate diagram on the cement floor in her own spit. When she completed it, she took a deep breath, and slowly, carefully, ran through the apporting equations, double-checking at each step, until she reached the end. And with a pop of displaced air…her familiar Gray appeared on top of the diagram. She felt faint for a moment as the energy to bring him here dropped out of her, but quickly recovered. He was practically blindingly bright to her mage-sight, as was the little backpack he was wearing. There was a limit to what she could apport right now, and Gray plus that pack was just about it.
I kept telling Moira you were all right, he said, as she unbuckled the backpack and rummaged through it. But as soon as you were in that van, we lost you to magic-location, and we knew that we had to wait for you to fetch me, she went into hyper-reactive mode.
Her hand closed on a chemlight; she bent it to break the seal and shook it vigorously. Sure, she could have made some sort of magic light…but that took energy and that energy was going to have to come from her. And any energy she had was energy she might…she was probably…going to need every bit of.
She got up, and walked to the walls. Two sides, the right and the back—she assumed it was the “back” because it was opposite the wall with a door in it—were made of ancient ceramic tile. Impossible to tell what color it was in the green glow of the chemlight. The other two walls were made of cinderblocks, cemented together, with a heavy steel door set into the middle of the “front.” In the middle of the right-hand wall, black tiles spelled out the words “Court Street.” Gray sat in the middle of the floor, watching her intently.
Vickie went to the steel door, and put her ear to the crack around it. She heard murmuring. It didn’t sound like conversation.
Now she rummaged through the little backpack until she found the silk-lined clamshell case that held the ECHO-tech radio and headset. Just as she found them, she felt a distant vibration in the floor under her feet. That cemented her guess. There was only one place she could be. The subway. This is a deserted station, I’ll bet on it.
She donned the radio, curved the boom of the mic to her mouth and made sure the earpiece was firmly in place before whispering, “Break, break, break.”
Nothing. Dammit. She knelt, now, and put one hand on the cement floor. It wasn’t as good as earth, but there was earth under it. Her reach might be about fifty feet. If there was anything within that distance, she ought to be able to figure out something of what it was.
It was enough. She sensed four sets of human feet…and twenty or thirty of something dark and evil. The humans stood in a circle around something...it might be an altar. It might be a summoning circle. But it was extremely powerful, and extremely nasty.
Now what’s our move? Gray asked in her head. She considered, sitting back down on the floor and shielding the light of the chem-light from the door with her body. No point in alerting anything out there that she wasn’t either unconscious or terrified, and in the dark. Not that I’m all that far off being terrified. This was incredibly iffy. If she was on a deserted, abandoned subway platform, it was probably walled off, and her parents were going to have to figure out how to get to her. That would take time. How much time? She had no idea. How long did she have before the people out there came to make her their next sacrifice? She had no idea about that, either. “I have to get you out of this cell and you have to find the team and bring them here,” she said, finally, as she extracted her Fairbairn-Sykes knife from the backpack and put it on her belt again. The knife served as both a practical combat weapon and her atheme, which should make it effective against whoever and whatever was out there. “So I need to do two things. I need to figure out how to unlock that door, and I need to figure out the spellcasting that’s going on out there. I’m the one with the best shot at putting a monkey-wrench in the works until the cavalry gets here.”
Stay positive. Don’t think “if” the cavalry gets here.
She held the chemlight close to the door, and saw with dismay that this wasn’t going to be easy. There was no opening to the locking mechanism on this side, and the door fit too closely into the frame for her to try slipping the lock with her knife. She examined the other side, but the hinges weren’t accessible either.
“Nazrat,” she said, with feeling.
In order to get Gray on the other side of that door, she needed a landing platform—or else it had to be line-of-sight, which wasn’t possible, obviously. So she needed the “receiving” apportation diagram to be on the other side of that door….
She got back down on her hands and knees, and laid her head on the cement next to the door. There was a crack under it. Certainly just big enough to slide a piece of paper under. If she’d had a piece of paper.
To keep the panic down, she did as she had been taught. Slowly, and carefully, she itemized everything Gray was carrying, and everything, absolutely everything, that was on her own body. Until she came to the next-to-last layer of her clothing. T-shirt…
It was old, cotton and worn as thin as paper.
Stripping everything off to get to it, she had it off, and cut a square out of it with her knife. It wasn’t the first time she’d used her blood to make a diagram, and it probably wouldn’t be the last; the best place to cut was the outside of the arm, and the ferrule of her shoelace worked well enough as a dip-pen. When the diagram was complete, she checked it three times, waved it in the air until it was dry, then carefully fed it under the door. She put her hand on the cement near the crack, and ascertained that the piece of fabric was still flat enough to use. Then she looked at Gray.
“You ready to go out there and find them and bring them back?”
The rats that took you got in here. I may not be a dog, but I can follow their scent out.
“Okay then. Hurry back. Tell them what I know. Meanwhile I’ll try and figure out how to get myself out of here.” She looked at the cell, and shivered. “If they come for me before you get the team here, I want to be on ground of my choosing.”
Gray looked at her with his head sideways. And put your clothes on, he said.
She laughed, weakly, as she was meant to do. And then she ran through the equations, and with a pop of displaced air, Gray was gone.
I’m out, she heard in her mind. We’ll be back soon. Save some for us.
She sat back on her heels, the chemlight clutched in her hands. Gray was gone. And there were so many things that could go wrong. There could be a door between here and the street that was locked and only the people who’d snatched her had the key to. It could take Gray hours to find his way to the surface, hours that she didn’t have, because that ritual out there was building up to the point where those people would need their sacrifice, and that would be her. She had no idea how long that would take, only that the clock was ticking. She’d played bait before, but never in a situation so precarious. Never had she been without backup. Never had she heard that “ticking clock” so clearly. She was cold, her throat tight, and she knew this feeling.
It was fear. No, it was terror.
But if she hadn’t volunteered…they’d have grabbed someone else today. Some poor kid that didn’t even know magic existed. Some kid that didn’t have a prayer, who would have been doomed from the moment these goons got their paws on him. Some kid who had parents, friends, maybe siblings, who would never have known what happened to him until maybe someone found the current dumping spot for bodies.
She tried to push away the thought that if the team didn’t get to her in time…she might be able to fight the mob that was out there off for a while, but not forever. Tried to push it away, but it was…persistent.
Her eyes stung.
She remembered the day her mother had sat down next to her, very solemn, her expression such that Vickie had known she was going to ask something serious. “Suppose,” Moira had said, “You were tied to a railroad track. And we could save you, but the train would be wrecked, and hundreds of people would die—”
And Vickie hadn’t even taken a second to think about it. “Then you save the train,” she’d said, firmly. And Moira had teared up and hugged her, and she had known then, it wasn’t just the right answer it was the right answer.
It was only later that she understood the question hadn’t been rhetorical, the first time she’d asked to come on one of the team’s cases, because they needed a technomancer and she was the only one there was. She hadn’t known then how rare her abilities were, she’d only known that her parents, and Hosteen, and the people who were depending on them to stop the bad guy needed what only she could do. And things had gotten hairy, and that was when she had actually realized why her mother had asked that question.
Because if it came to a choice between saving her, and saving two or more other people, her parents would choose to save the others. They had to. And she agreed with that. In theory anyway.
But when you were sitting on your heels in a cold concrete cell with someone out there about to slit your throat and no idea if help was going to arrive in time….
Then she took a long, shuddering breath, and kicked herself in the ass. They were out there because they were confident she had a good shot at saving herself. They treated her like an adult, and gave her the credit and respect of one.
So I’d better damn well act like one.
She knelt down next to the cinder-block wall, right where it joined the back tile wall. The farther away she got from those sounds of voices, the less likely it would be that anyone would notice what she was doing.
She couldn’t get past the door; she didn’t know the lock mechanism, so she couldn’t move the pins to let herself out, and the bastards hadn’t put an electronic lock on there she could have persuaded into letting her go. She could ram the earth up through the floor, or at least could eventually, and bring down the wall, but that would be extremely noisy, and noise was the last thing she wanted right now. The concrete platform was too thick to get to collapse, and anyway, that would be noisy too.
Can I get through the cinderblocks, somehow? She put her hand on the cinderblock nearest the tile wall and the floor.
It…wasn’t much like real earth. But at least it was more like real earth than asphalt was. She bent her will against it, trying to persuade the mixed substances of which it was made to fall apart into its component bits, the way she could with just about any form of earth. But too much of it was “unnatural,” the fly ash and clinkers mostly. She couldn’t get it to answer to her, and she didn’t have time to run the equations to figure out how to make it answer to her. She began to taste fear in the back of her mouth again.
Try the mortar.. It’s got sand in it. Then I can push a block out of the way.
She took a deep breath. If I do that the whole wall might come down. Which won’t be subtle or quiet.
Still, it was worth investigating. She transferred her attention to the mortar holding the blocks together, and instead of weakening it, she strengthened the substance by binding all the sand grains together. Because if—no, when—she got rid of the two-block stack, she didn’t want the whole wall to come down. She especially didn’t want it to come down on her.
I know what cinder blocks are made of. All I need to find is one natural element in these. Something that’s not manufactured. Instead of working against the whole block, if she could find something that was fundamentally still itself, like the sand in the mortar…she bent her will against the block again, this time not assuming, but looking and analyzing.
And held back a surge of elation when she found it. Kaolin, a clay. Now she had something she could work with, and she did the very opposite of what she had done with the mortar. Instead of binding all the kaolin particles together, she encouraged them to repel each other.
She was breathless and sweating when it finally happened, but happen it did. The cinderblock began to fall apart.
The one above it fell, but dropped slowly as the block beneath it crumbled gradually rather than powdering. She caught it before it could make a noise, and carefully dragged it into the cell with her. Then, grateful that she was so small, she crawled quickly out of the hole.
There was light out here, very dim light, from a single battery-powered camping lantern left on the far side of the platform, at the subway tunnel entrance. The platform was about thirty feet long; the cell only took up about a third of it. Below the platform was where the tracks had once been. They weren’t there anymore, there was only dirt and the remains of the track bedding. Dimly, down the unused tunnel, Vickie made out a sullen, red light.
She slipped over the edge of the platform and laid her hand flat on the dirt. And now her earth-magic could give her the information she desperately needed. “Break, break, break,” she whispered into her radio, hoping this time someone would answer.
“Go,” came the terse reply. She tried not to pass out from relief. At least they were somewhere the radio could reach now!
“Ritual in progress a hundred yards from my location, down subway tunnel” she said. “Four humans, unknown artifact, twenty seven svartálfar, in three groups of nine, walls of subway planted with crude explosives by amateurs.”
“Copy that. Making our way towards you.”
She waited. But that was not all she could do. Here, with real earth beneath her feet and palm, tainted though it was by decades of city pollution and contamination, there was work she, and only she, could do.
~o0o~
It seemed an eternity, but probably was no more than fifteen minutes, when Hosteen simply appeared on the edge of the platform. She was used to that; the Dineh was the nearest thing she had ever seen to a ninja. Shortly after that, her mother and father slipped in beside them, all of them crouching on the track-bed. Her father had already taken his wolf-form. Moira passed Vickie his sidearm.
She felt her spirits soar, and with them, her confidence. Now she could take on anything. She was with the team.
“Just in case,” Moira whispered. Vickie nodded.
“I think they’re about halfway through whatever ritual they’re doing,” she said.
Moira looked at her askance. “That seems…long.”
“I get the impression they haven’t got a freaking clue what they’re doing, except that they know if they deviate from it at all it’s either not going to work or will have a bad outcome.” She thought a moment. “I wonder if the svartálfar are the potential bad outcome.”
“Less talking,” Hosteen said. “Are you ready?”
She nodded, knelt down a little more, and put both hands flat on the trackbed. Every sense was on fire, vision, hearing, even smell sharpened as adrenaline flooded her system. And not just adrenaline; she pulled on the earth’s own energy and filled herself with it until she was just about to burst.
Hosteen racked a shell into the chamber of his shotgun. Alex tensed all over, crouching to spring. Moira of all of them was the one who stood up, hands held tensely at her side, her hair starting to stand out from the energy she was building.
“Three,” Hosteen said, grimly. “Two. Now.”
Vickie pushed with everything she had in her. At the end of the tunnel, a wedge of earth and rock thrust up out of the earth, knocking the four people back there down and separating them from the svartálfar. It didn’t stop until it hit the top of the tunnel. No matter what weapons they had back there, no matter what magic they could command or what that artifact could do, they were out of the combat for now.
But of course, the moment she did that, the svartálfar knew they were there.
The twisted creatures turned as quick as thought, but before they could move, Hosteen unloaded both barrels of his shotgun into them, four disintegrated when the shot struck them, and Moira raised her hands over her head, unleashing wind and lightning. The front ranks charged anyway—and right into a pit of soft sand Vickie had created where the end of the tunnel was. As soon as they had blundered into it, she hardened it, and they were trapped. The ones behind them blundered into them, unable to stop.
Hosteen racked in two more shells, salt and silver and cast-iron shot, and fired. Four more svartálfar fell to bits as Moira’s lightning lashed at them driving them closer together. Two managed to get through their trapped and panicking fellows; Alex leapt for the throat of one, and Vickie drew her Fairbairn-Sykes out of her boot, and went for the other. These twisted, malformed creatures of Nordic legend—black as obsidian, and looking like nothing so much as something out of a special-effects nightmare—did not handle the touch of iron or steel well at the best of times, and when that steel was an atheme, a knife so imbued with magic it practically glowed, the merest brush with it would probably be fatal. At the last minute, in mid-charge, the svartálfar realized what it was facing. Its eyes widened, and it skidded to a halt and tried to run back into the tunnel.
Too late. Vickie leapt after it, hitting it in the back with a flying side-kick. It went to the ground, then scrambled to its feet and faced her. She ducked under a pair of wild claw slashes as it fumbled for its own weapon. But trying to draw the stubby sword left it open.
She slashed, cutting its throat.
It fell back, black blood fountaining from its neck, even as the rest of its body disintegrated. She ignored it, looking around for another.
But the fight was over. Those svartálfar that were not dissolving away into the aether were fleeing through holes they’d opened up to escape back to their shadowy homeland. Within another minute, the tunnel was empty, the last of the svartálfar gone, even the bodies vanished. The only sounds were the muffled ones coming from the other side of Vickie’s earthen barrier.
Alex writhed all over; Vickie looked away, as Moira pulled a pair of jeans and a t-shirt from her backpack and handed them to him. When she looked back her father was standing there, human again, clothed and with his FBI badge on a lanyard around his neck, but barefoot. He looked to Hosteen. “Call it in?”
The Dineh nodded. Alex looked past him to Vickie. “Good job. You can let them out now.” His teeth bared in something that was not a smile. “I can’t wait to see what we find.”
~o0o~
The abandoned station was swarming with FBI forensic techs, although Moira had looked over the artifact on the improvised altar, frowned, and destroyed it before they arrived. Although the four—who turned out to be, of all things, lawyers—had been fanatically careful about leaving no evidence back on the station platform, there was plenty at, on, and around their sacrificial altar. And, of course, there was the undeniable fact that they had abducted Vickie herself. And already one of the four had turned on the others and was babbling his mouth off, hoping to cut a deal.
Vickie shook her head with incredulity. “Cases. They were murdering kids to win cases.”
Hosteen snorted with disgust. “Lucrative cases,” Alex pointed out. “Extremely lucrative. Those weren’t off-the-rack suits they were wearing, you know.”
“But—” Vickie felt sick. And disgusted. “Ugh. Just…ugh.”
“Look on the bright side,” her father pointed out, as they picked their way through the debris on the entrance stairs to the exit.
“What’s that?” she asked, as he stood aside to let her emerge, blinking, into the late afternoon light. It was still overcast, but, after the dark of the tunnel, it seemed painfully bright.
“They could have been using the same power to go into politics instead,” he pointed out.
She shuddered.